A Treatise on Parents and Children

Older children might do a good deal before beginning their collegiate / education. What is the matter with our universities is that all the / students are schoolboys, whereas it is of the very essence of university / education that they should be men. The function of a university is not / to teach things that can now be taught as well or better by University / Extension lectures or by private tutors or modern correspondence classes / with gramophones. We go to them to be socialized; to acquire the hall / mark of communal training; to become citizens of the world instead of / inmates of the enlarged rabbit hutches we call homes; to learn manners / and become unchallengeable ladies and gentlemen. The social pressure / which effects these changes should be that of persons who have faced / the full responsibilities of adults as working members of the general / community, not that of a barbarous rabble of half emancipated schoolboys / and unemancipable pedants. It is true that in a reasonable state of / society this outside experience would do for us very completely what the / university does now so corruptly that we tolerate its bad manners only / because they are better than no manners at all. But the university will / always exist in some form as a community of persons desirous of pushing / their culture to the highest pitch they are capable of, not as solitary / students reading in seclusion, but as members of a body of individuals / all pursuing culture, talking culture, thinking culture, above all, / criticizing culture. If such persons are to read and talk and criticize / to any purpose, they must know the world outside the university at least / as well as the shopkeeper in the High Street does. And this is just / what they do not know at present. You may say of them, paraphrasing / Mr. Kipling, "What do they know of Plato that only Plato know? " If our / universities would exclude everybody who had not earned a living by his / or her own exertions for at least a couple of years, their effect would / be vastly improved.